To What Extent Do Board Member Experience Influence the Performance of New Ventures

Boards of directors monitor and advice firm management, and while research paid attention to the human and social capital of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial teams in an effort to explain performance outcomes of their new ventures, boards of directors of new ventures are understudied. In the setting of new ventures, the resource provision function of boards of directors is underlined to be of significance. Therefore, this paper investigates the relation between industry-specific and directorial experiences of board members of new ventures and the venture’s performance. We employ the Norwegian registry data, which is a longitudinal employer-employee matched dataset that involves individual work histories of all residents in Norway, as well as enables the identification of board directors. We include 51,117 startups over the period 2005 to 2013 in our sample. The analysis demonstrates that although the presence …